Bright Lines (4 page)

E
lla sat outside on the stoop watching their block. There was a curious chain of seven matching pink racer bikes locked in front of the downstairs garden apartment, which housed Hashi’s salon. Streamers and baskets adorned the bikes, and on all but one, a single cardboard placard hung from the handlebars, spelling C-A-R-M-E-N. In front of the apartment building across the street, neighbors were barbecuing hamburgers on the sidewalk with a portable grill, blaring “Saturday Love” from a Caprice Classic. Dr. Duray, the retired dentist, rested on a lawn chair and sang lyrics from his original ditty, “The Girls on Cambridge Place Are Oh So Pretty.” He waved at Ella, and she waved back.

“Want some barbecue, girl?” he called over to her.

“No thank you, sir,” she said.

He nodded his head side-to-side the way the elderly trailed their words, but stopped singing his song. She wondered if he’d lost his muse upon seeing her.
Barbecue.
The word made her want to hurl. Uncontrollable trembling and nauseating heat had eaten away most of her morning. She couldn’t shed the image of Malik and Charu’s contorted bodies from her mind. Ella heard Charu’s glossy words—
You look really good without those glasses
—echoing inside her. Noonday sun emblazoned their block, and the brownstone steps singed Ella’s bare feet. A pack of teenage girls pranced through the bursting arc of water from a hydrant broken open, sundresses plastered against their supple bodies. Ella felt a burning shame return and turned her gaze to her neighbor’s scarlet oak tree. All parts of the tree were
completely green—the shiny leaves, bushy tail-like catkins, the immature acorns—with no hint of the rich autumnal red the leaves would turn in just a few months. She squinted for a closer inspection—the female flowers grew on much shorter spikes than the male catkins; all at once, the monoecious
Quercus coccinea
bore male and female parts. She’d worried about leaving Ithaca, she realized. She felt much more at home in nature, hiking in the woods, alone, listening to Debussy on headphones. She volunteered at the student-run farm. She had even considered staying over the summer, to serve as a manager in the Market Garden project. Along with other students and volunteers, Ella could plant and harvest a two-acre vegetable plot and herb garden, and then market the produce at local farm stands.

But she couldn’t bear the idea of not coming home.

Staying in Ithaca meant no Anwar and Hashi, and no Charu. After the whole family dropped her off on campus for freshman orientation, Ella had refrained from inviting Charu again. She knew that her cousin would undoubtedly provoke the oversexed undergrads, the frat boys, dorks, and potheads in her dorm, and that would make Ella—sad.

Her glasses slipped down her sweaty nose, and everything became blurry. All the parts of the scarlet oak morphed into one large, green mass. A thick, smoky breeze shook the tree, and it appeared to expand immensely, then contract. It did this many times, and Ella saw each phase of the tree’s metamorphosis. With one cycle of expansion and contraction, the tree bore foliage; a second time, there were flowers. The final expansion sprouted acorns, followed by a final tightening that produced the seed. All the parts of this oak sprouted from one archetypal plant, which took on multiple forms. But in essence, it was all one being. Ella pushed her glasses back up. The tree was just as still as it had been before.

There was a loud popping sound coming from the garden apartment—a champagne cork shot upward—and Ella found herself walking down to her aunt’s salon.

 * * * 

Peeping through the vestibule door, Ella saw the mélange of thread, hair spray, and toasted bridesmaids painted and waiting. The bride,
a young girl of twenty, stood in front of a mirror, gazing at the hive of hair frozen in place.

“Beautiful, no?” said Hashi, nudging the girl.

“Carmen’s getting married!” whooped one of the bridesmaids. The laughing women rushed toward the door, billows of satin and taffeta nearly knocking Ella over.

“Excuse me.” The party of seven paid no mind to her as they made their way to their matching bicycles. They hitched their dresses above their bottoms, revealing old-fashioned bloomers. They hopped on and pedaled to the Presbyterian church around the corner, hollering as they rode.

Hashi grimaced. “Please do not sweat off the makeup!” she called after them. She bumped into Ella as she turned back toward the house. “Ella!” she exclaimed, as if she were the one person who could have surprised her.

“I’m sorry, I was just . . .” Ella began.

“What is it, dear?”

“I—I don’t know.”

Hashi squinted at her, calculating, tapping her chin with her forefinger. “Come,” she said. She flipped the Open sign to Closed, and locked the salon entrance.

“Sit down, my dear,” she said, gesturing to the chair at the sink. “Take off your glasses. Close your eyes.”

Without her glasses the hair dryer chairs appeared as globe-headed robots; bottles of shampoo and hair spray became an army of pawns. It dawned on Ella that in her whole life with the Saleem family, she could count the number of times she’d come into her aunt’s salon on one hand. She closed her eyes. She felt the chair pump backward so that her head lay on the cool ceramic sink, Hashi’s tea-tree-flavored breath on her face, her slight and saggy bosom pressed against her shoulders. It sounded like Hashi was rubbing her hands together; a moment later she felt warm olive oil on her head. Hashi rubbed it in, softening the frizz, then ran water through her hair and massaged in a musky shampoo. The water sent a chill down her back. Hashi lifted her head to roughly towel her dry. She brought Ella to one of the salon’s high chairs and spun her around. Hashi selected a pair of scissors and began snipping away dead hair; in minutes the back of Ella’s neck pricked at the air
of the fan. She ran her hand over her hair—it was short, like a boy’s. An odd feeling, not unpleasant, and rather uncertain, tickled her. She heard a faucet run—it sounded like the bathtub—Hashi had gone into the bathroom.

Ella heard Hashi coming back into the room. Hashi grabbed her hand and said, “Follow me.” She led Ella into the bathroom and then Ella, eyes still closed, heard what sounded like stirring ice in water. Then, the sound of a knife chopping—no one chopped like Hashi—and the air became infused with the scent of cucumber and mint. More stirring.

“Ella, take my hand, and when I say step, you step,” said Hashi. “Step!”

She took one step and her right foot was submerged in freezing water. “Aaah, shit!”

“Step!”

She put her other foot in.

“Do not move. Do not open eyes,” Hashi commanded.

Ella heard the snipping before she felt her clothes being shorn off.

“Uh . . .” she managed to say, stripped naked and mortified. Hashi pressed her hands into Ella’s arms. With one swift motion, she dunked Ella in the water.

“Raaaah!” Ella shuddered violently.

She remembered her route to New York from Dhaka with Anwar and Hashi. She had never met them before, but distinguished them by smell: Fried Onion Uncle and Talcum Powder Auntie.
Want the window seat, child?
Talcum Powder Auntie offered, and Ella had nodded yes. On the plane, she’d leaned against Talcum Powder Auntie’s gardenia-scented underarms. After many hours had passed, out the small rounded window, she watched clouds shape-shift into Hans Christian Andersen characters. Somewhere over Arabia, cumulus clouds turned into a wedge of migrating swans.

In Berlin, they switched planes. Skin pale, eyes blue and hard. She spoke not a word, not even as her ears popped on the descent and the burning orange-yellow runway lights welcomed her. Talcum Powder Auntie offered her a cotton swab dabbed in attar of roses, a clean and crisp scent—deafening sound of wheel scraping asphalt.

Outside, it was December, and unbearably cold.

Hashi drew Ella’s head up and out of the ice water, then back in again. Every aperture constricted. Underwater, the floating cucumber slices resembled Frisbees in a gray sky. Mint swam around like seaweed. She blew bubbles and spat water out.

“This lets the heat out. You have done very, very well.” Hashi enveloped her in a towel that felt like it had been baking in an oven. Ella collapsed against her.

There was a light in the darkness—it appeared red and blue at once, and dissolved into a million flashes. The hot towel worked its magic.

Hashi handed her a bundle. “Wear this.”

Ella felt her way through the articles. A shirt made of linen. The other piece was of a stiffer material—a pair of trousers. The new clothes were laundered fresh, but gave her the same sensation as pulling old vinyl out of the sleeve.

“And here,” said Hashi, handing her a pair of tinted aviator glasses.

Ella put them on. The glasses were more stylish than her old pair. She caught herself in the mirror. She looked like her father in the photograph, but softer and marked with her mother’s lashes and full lips. Her hair: a short, masculine Caesar cut that brought out her chiseled features.
Would Charu like it?

“An utter incarnation of my brother.
Mashallah!
These are your father’s old clothes. I have been saving them for you.”

Ella took off her father’s glasses—she’d started to get a headache—and held her aunt’s hand. She saw Hashi’s face, stern and lovely, and felt a comfort with her aunt for the first time since that plane ride. Without thinking, she squeezed Hashi’s hand.

“What is it, Ella?”

“I don’t know what to say,” Ella replied, looking down. She fingered a tortoiseshell button.

Hashi cleared her throat. “Your father often fell into long silences, sometimes for days on end. I never could penetrate this quiet, as much as I would tug his hair, try to make him laugh. This changed during the war. Training with the freedom fighters in the Mukti Bahini, meeting Anwar, and of course your ma, Laila, pumped this fire into him. Afterward, when little had improved for the poorest in our country, he fell into a dark depression. But when you were
born, Ella, something took over him, like wood kindling on a stove, where it’s warmest deep within. You know, he called us just to let us listen to the new baby, the first one in our family. ‘Listen, listen to this little giggler,’ he told us. And you laughed into the receiver. Oh, I don’t have words for what we’ve lost. All I do know is that something will change. Something great will happen to you, Ella. Someone great. This will fill you up.”

Ella patted down a wrinkle in the shirt. She did not yet have the words. All her life, she had never felt pretty. Now, the person in front of her was perhaps the truest she had ever felt to her insides. If they were alive . . . It was a refrain she avoided as resolutely as she avoided Charu. She wondered if they would see themselves in her, if she would be this way if they were here. She probably would never have left Bangladesh. She doubted she would feel anything for Charu if they were alive. Right? Ella doubted she could be sure about that.

She recalled vague memories of her mother lining her eyes with kohl to stave off the evil eye; standing on her father’s feet while he ran like a madman through the house. She had a fleeting sensation—being enveloped in her mother’s arms, lost in her dry hennaed tresses.

As quickly as it came, it was gone.

W
eekends are no fun anymore
, thought Anwar. He wandered from the bedroom and hesitated to knock on Charu’s door to see if she wanted some breakfast, even though it was noon. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could poach an egg. Hashi had stopped making breakfast on weekends and holidays, since these were her busiest days. Today she was at work in the salon tending to a gaggle of bridesmaids. She’d been rather quiet in the morning, but Anwar didn’t probe her for the source of her discontent. Weekends were precious; he had the time to enjoy a home-cooked meal. He was hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—also known as HALT, something he’d picked up from a self-help book lingering in the bathroom a while back.

He preferred Hashi’s heavy sighs to conversation. Those sighs were indicators that required shamanic intuition to decipher. Sometimes they were related to slow business or joint pain; other times it was a forgotten Mother’s Day present or anniversary (they’d said “I do” on a telephone call, so the day didn’t quite stick in Anwar’s mind). He knew that she worried about Charu’s indiscretions, whether she’d done her duties as a mother and a Muslim. It affected their sex life. Even in sleep Hashi cocooned far away on the bed, and Anwar could hardly get a good cuddle. Sex was not something Anwar had ever fathomed talking about with their daughter, and he trusted that Charu had a strong will and plenty of smarts to be on the right side of trouble.

Anwar went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face,
plus a spritz of his special rosewater tonic. Further discouraging was that in a couple of hours his brother, Aman, would arrive. His elder brother was the successful owner of three pharmacies, childhood tormentor of Anwar, and now, most recently, a divorcé. Anwar noticed a pile of hibiscus petals in the bathroom wastebasket. He removed the petals and set them into a small bowl he found under the sink. Dried hibiscus wasn’t the best choice for potpourri; it smelled musty, with a dash of tomato. His obsession with olfaction masked the smell of mud and shit from the garden. While he was oblivious to his own fishy odor, he used a surgical mask when setting mulch and manure for his plants. He spaced out in a squatting position, sniffing the petals.

“Baba, what are you doing?” Charu interrupted his meditation, pinched her bath towel tight across her chest. She wore that damned Tibetan bell around her neck. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. He wished that this middle stage in their relationship would hurry up and pass. He longed to be white-haired and holding a grandchild already.

“Charu, you look like a holy cow. I am thinking,” Anwar said. “What are you doing up oh so early? I worry about you making it to classes on time.”

“Aw, Baba, c’mon. I went to bed without dinner.”

“That was your choice.”

“Well, hurry up; Maya needs to use the bathroom, and I’ve got to shower,” said Charu.

“Maya?” Anwar hadn’t seen the girl behind Charu.

“Thank you, sir,” said the girl.

“Remember I said she’d stay over last night?” asked Charu. “Remember?”

Anwar suspected that anytime Charu said,
Remember . . . I told you
, most often he did not remember because she had never said a thing. He raised an eyebrow. “I pretend you are singing when you are lying. It is nice to meet you, Maya. A short, sweet, and powerful name.”

“My father’s a weirdo,” said Charu.

“I am not a weirdo.” Anwar gestured up to the ceiling. “Gods and demons conjure the world’s illusions with Maya—”

“I thought you don’t believe in gods or demons.”

“Good point. Shouldn’t you two be outside? Isn’t it summertime or something?”

“Where’s Ella?” Charu asked, winking at her friend. “Did she go into the room last night?”

“I was knocked out. I didn’t hear anything,” said Maya.

“Ella is home?” Anwar hopped up out of his squat, wincing at his strained knees. “Fantastic news!”

“Yeah, yeah, we know you’re all smiles now,” said Charu. “Bye!”

“Yes, bye. Now, hurry and shower so you can make us lunch.” He stood up and stroked Charu’s hair; a hibiscus petal crumbled in his hand. “Petals are everywhere today!”

He shooed the girls away. “Ella is home,” he said, smiling. There were two places she might be—her room, or the gardens. Like her uncle, she was a creature of habit.

Anwar walked downstairs and peeked into Ella’s bedroom—the bed was neatly made, sheets tucked under the mattress, pillow fluffed. He shook his head with admiration—if there was any proof she was an Anwar, not a Saleem, it was that neat streak. He turned in to the living room. The floor bumped with the sounds of music from Hashi’s salon. He continued on to the kitchen, which smelled like last night’s onions. His stomach growled.

Someone really needed to do something about lunch.

He took a quick peek through the kitchen’s sliding glass door. No sign of Ella. He decided to go upstairs to sulk in his studio.

 * * * 

On his way upstairs, he heard the vestibule door wiggling. Did Aman somehow have keys to the apartment? Anwar opened the door to let the struggling fool inside.

“Ah! Ramona Espinal,” he said. His tenant wore dandelion yellow scrubs, her face bright and symmetrical as a honeycomb.

“Hello, Anwar,” said Ramona, smiling. “How’s your Sunday?”

“Wife is busy, kids are nowhere to be found—typical. And yours?”

“Had an overnight birth at the hospital.”

“Wonderful color,” said Anwar. “All colors are good colors—I don’t have a favorite—but yellow suits—”

“Ha. Yes. This is my
Comadrona
Ramona jumpsuit. Need to do laundry.”

“Coma-what?”

“Midwife. Another word to add to your Spanish.”

“I will, La Enfermera,” said Anwar.

“Very good. I’m a nurse-midwife, so you will be even more precise.”

He’d learned the word for
nurse
, but here she was, throwing wrenches into his lessons. “Any plans for today?”

“I should do laundry at some point. I don’t want to disturb Hashi,” said Ramona, nodding toward the salon, where the washing machine and dryer were housed. “Sounds like a busy day. I’ll do a load later in the evening. I’m so tired. It’s time for a long bath.”

“Very good idea. I am right behind you,” he said, gesturing for her to go first up the stairs. “I mean, not for the bath; I just meant, for you it’s good, and I, too, am going upstairs—
arré
, never mind me, please.”

“I wrote a note to myself,” said Ramona, raising her palm to Anwar.
PAY RENT
, it read, in blue ballpoint pen. “If you don’t mind, I can write you a check now, before I pass out.”

Her apartment was a replica of the first floor, without access to the backyard. Walls painted in marigold and tourmaline evoked picturesque adobe haunts. Everything was messy, complicated, indulgent. A vintage Schwinn Le Tour, much like his first bicycle in America, leaned against the wall.
It is the same weight as a third-grader; how does she carry this upstairs by herself?
Some things never went out of style: a cartoonish plastic Polaroid 600 camera and a scattering of self-portraits shot one-handed, with rather uncreative titles scribbled with black Sharpie pen: Ramona at the park, Ramona in her scrubs, Ramona eating a hamburger. Anwar noticed the dictionary refrigerator magnets, and went over for a closer look. He mouthed the nonsensical strings of words:

rugged-mariner-betrothed-never

corrupt-curmudgeon-lover-escape

“No need to stand, Anwar,” said Ramona. “Please sit at the table.”

He sat at the little table for two. Ms. Espinal wasn’t hosting a dinner party anytime soon—the table was littered with Mexican pesos; postcards from San Juan and Lagos; a tiny red, black, and green flag; coffee rings and a half-drunk bottle of red wine.

“Mal-bec,” he mouthed. He wanted to have a taste. He was a smoker these days, and hadn’t had a sip of wine since Charu was a young child.

Ramona pulled out a checkbook from the clutter and wrote,
Eight hundred and fifty dollars and no cents
. They could have easily charged a thousand or more for the location and condition of the apartment in their neighborhood, but he suspected the quality of the person went down as the rent went up.

“Here you are,” she said, tearing along the perforated line.

At that moment, the downstairs doorbell rang. Two seconds later, a loud pounding on the front door.

“Shit, it’s my brother,” said Anwar.

“Not the most patient dude, huh?”

“Definitely not.”

 * * * 

Anwar opened the front door. “You’ve got just one bag, bhai?”

“Well, I don’t plan on staying here forever,” said Aman. He stood wearing a long-sleeve button-down shirt and slacks—his uniform—though it was ninety degrees outside. Their features were distinguishable—Aman’s rounder and cherubic, Anwar’s wiry and mischievous. Only their mustaches made them look like brothers.

“You’ll be downstairs, here in the living room. It’s not much privacy, but that’s what we have,” said Anwar. “Besides, Ella lives on this floor, and she’s quiet as a librarian.”

“In my day, a younger brother would offer his own bed,” said Aman.

“We are three years apart.”

“Smells in here, man.”

“It does?”

“Perhaps it’s just the mess.”

“Brother, this is a living room, a room for
living
. You have all the amenities a man could ask for. This is an indecently comfortable corduroy sofa and reclining chair—directly staring at a big-screen television box affixed with surround sound. This carpet, woven by Turks, is lush enough to fill the spaces between your toes. Not in the mood for TV? Read anything on this coffee table: books, clothbound and colorful—Rand McNally’s 1979 edition of
An Atlas of the
World
;
A Beginner’s Book of Knots
; and the last seven issues of
Newsweek
. Goodness, man, smell the fresh flower arrangements from our garden—”

Anwar paused. He wondered how his brother could condemn slovenliness when Aman
himself
was so remarkably offensive! He reeked of an indecipherable unpleasant odor. Anwar ascribed this to a criticizing nature tinged with the misery of irritable bowels.

“How are you feeling, bhai?”

“Like I’ve been struck by a train car. This is very hard.” Aman looked grayer, and softer, than Anwar had ever seen him. In fact, the man looked damned vulnerable. “I tell her that my business is what keeps our family together, alive. But Nidi is a stubborn woman.”

“She was so serene,” said Anwar. Aman had married a songstress, a woman of great classical training. He’d plucked her out of a crowd of young first-year girls at Eden College, back in Dhaka, pursuing her like mad, writing love letters and leaving roses in front of her dorm room. Instead of running from his obsession, Nidi ran headfirst into it, and now she’d had enough.

“Bah! Serene. The woman’s driven me mad over the years. Just as well.”

They heard a furious clanging bell from the kitchen.

“What the hell is that?” said Aman.

“Charu is announcing lunchtime.”

 * * * 

They found Charu and Maya setting the old elm wood dining table. Anwar marveled at the spread of plates: cinnamon and sugar French toast adorned with berries, scrambled eggs with greens straight from the garden. His mouth quivered. When had this happened? His daughter appeared thoroughly demure and Anwar loved this temporary shift in her character. Watching her quelled his annoyance at his brother’s
negativo
vibe.

As Charu garnished the French toast with powdered sugar, she reminded Anwar of his childhood maid Hawa. She had served him lunch with a tacit smile—she was young enough to be his sister, and their father raised her as lovingly as one would raise a servant, without trespassing the bounds of class—she was performing her duty; her performance gave her pleasure. With their mother dead after
Anwar’s birth, they’d had a few girls take care of Aman and Anwar as babies. Hawa lasted longer than any others he could remember. But one day, she ran away and never returned. A few years later, Anwar had heard that Hawa was still alive, living in a different border town, Jaflong, in Sylhet. Their father had died soon after the girl’s departure, perhaps of a broken heart.

Anwar noticed his brother straighten a folded napkin fallen on its side, appraising the girls’ work, as if they were servers in a restaurant. He shook his head at Aman’s perpetual obsession with order. It struck Anwar how little a person changed in half a century. He imagined Nidi had grown tired of Aman, a mean-spirited curmudgeon at best. After twenty-plus years together, it was his unhealthy want for control. As a boy, Aman had been skinny, jaundiced, and bitter as a stalk of young sugarcane. He’d been a miniature adult as young as ten, adept at farming and raising chickens and goats, but also excelling in sports and studies. The person he cared to impress was their father, a self-absorbed anthropologist who was oblivious to the violent changes happening in their country. Aman assisted their father with small tasks, filing and chronologically labeling the artifacts. The elder Saleem encouraged his son to pursue studies in archaeology, but Aman dreamt of wealth. When it was evident the old man would die, Aman left Jessore forever to attend Dhaka University, and Anwar followed him to university in 1969, the year he first met Rezwan. While Aman became a pharmacist, Anwar found himself more and more entangled in the country’s politics. Aman kept his distance from Anwar, Rezwan, and their rabble-rousing comrades, keeping to his books and nursing his obsessive desire for Nidi.

As they neared middle age—Aman had turned fifty-five in early April; Anwar celebrated his fifty-second birthday in late April—Anwar realized that his brother’s troubled nature had not found peace with age. Those old rages lay dormant inside the unreachable parts of his heart.

“Anwar, you don’t care that she dresses like that?” said Aman, glancing at Charu.

“I think she looks quite nice,” said Anwar. He looked over Charu’s dress. She revealed just her shoulders and slim calves. Everything else worth covering seemed to be covered.